A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Open Air)

The 75th anniversary season of the Open Air Theatre is well and truly under way now that the venue’s signature play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has joined the summer repertory.

Retiring artistic director Ian Talbot is once again giving his Bottom, and in the mechanicals’ play-within-a-play interlude on opening night, his scene-stealing “performance within a performance” as the suicidal Pyramus come back to life to declare “Now am I dead, now am I fled…my soul is in the sky…” just as a jumbo jet obligingly roared above the tall dark trees on its way to Heathrow.

It was a wonderful moment, and Talbot’s milking of the laughter the only (allowable) loose moment in Christopher Luscombe’s vigorous, well-plotted and stoutly well-spoken new production.

Playing on the Victorians’ enthusiasm for antiquity, Janet Bird’s design is a Greek amphitheatre where lovers and fairies loll on the rising tiers, Titania snuggles in her bower at the top, and the cast assembles like an orchestra, conducted by Theseus on the clarinet, to play Gary Yershon’s beguiling overture.

The stern edict of David Peart’s upright Egeus sets the tone of starchy formality that certainly suits the lovers’ exchanges. Lysander and Demetrius (Sam Alexander and Norman Bowman) are buttoned up in frock coats and grey suits that are gradually undone by the entanglements in the forest, while Hattie Ladbury’s willowy, spinsterish Helena – she reminds me a good deal, both physically and comically, of Tamsin Greig’s RSC Beatrice last year – is a powerfully peevish foil to Olivia Darnley’s pert and wide-eyed Hermia.

What this version never really unleashes is the erotic undertow of the comedy. Richard Glaves’ Puck, like all the fairies, has a Victorian painterly appearance in flowing, pastel-coloured silks and a set of woodland pipes. He is more wistfully mischievous than most modern Pucks; perhaps this step back from the “down and dirty” fairyland of recent fashion is a welcome surprise.

Despite a melodically intoned Oberon from Mark Meadows (doubling as Theseus), there isn’t enough urgency or devilry in his revenge on Sarah Woodward’s disdainful Titania (doubled with a frowning, reluctantly spliced Hippolyta). The stuffing is knocked out of the centre of the play because the production avoids the possibility of sexual delirium.

These are not necessarily strictures; Luscombe knows exactly what he’s doing. And the evening is highly enjoyable and satisfying. Talbot’s stage-hogging Bottom strides on and off with his leading arm raised heroically, oblivious to the promptings and cajolings of the first-ever theatrical representation of a theatre director, Chris Emmett’s tactful Peter Quince.

Yershon’s music is a delight, the fairy songs augmented with pipes and extra voices. And the glimmering, candle-lit finale works, as always at this address, with a heart-stopping, poignant beauty.

– Michael Coveney